


Britta-Bot Diagnostics

by mayoho



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Abed fixing people, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 23:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3707527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayoho/pseuds/mayoho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Britta is in a bit of a tailspin. It feels like her life is collapsing around her and Abed isn't helping, until he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Britta-Bot Diagnostics

Living with Annie and Abed sometimes made Britta want to cry, and it wasn’t just because she was a 33 year old woman sleeping on a couch purchased with her parents’ dirty money. It was little things. Things that proved how Annie and Abed fit together like an old married couple, a couple she could never be part of because couples were only two people (but that also wasn’t why she didn’t fit--she was sure Annie, Abed, and Troy had fit). 

It was the way they drifted off to their bedrooms at the same time without discussing it (anytime between 11 and 1--they never said anything and Britta couldn’t even catch a significant glance, but somehow they both just knew) and wouldn’t flip their lights off for hours afterwards as they did whatever it was that they did on their laptops (and Britta would lay on her couch-bed with the lights off, not doing anything, slowly filling with a sense of melancholy until it was so overwhelming she almost couldn’t breathe). It was the way neither of them really seemed to sleep--up long after she had fallen asleep and awake and puttering between the bathroom, the kitchen, and their respective bedrooms long before she wanted to be awake. 

It was the way the two of them would discuss organizational techniques--Abed trying to convince Annie to digitize her scrapbooks so they could be cross-referenced and linked and tagged, Annie trying to discredit the validity of physical web diagrams, both of them brainstorming new features they wanted in Evernote (and it wasn’t just that Britta didn’t share their passion for indexing and filing, it was how there was nothing important enough in her head to index and file, and there never would be, because she was Britta, and she was the worst). 

It was the way they could ignore each other like they were encased in protective bubbles when Abed got too wrapped up in a project and stopped sleeping or using words that made any sense to anyone without a film degree, or when Annie got panic-y about the possibility of a less than perfect grade and started not sleeping and stress cleaning and reciting endless lists of facts about forensics (and Britta would trip over them in all the places they bounced off each other and she wasn’t even safe sitting quietly on her couch-bed). 

It was the way Abed would circle around and bump shoulders with Annie--non-sexual but still wildly possessive, like a cat headbutting its favorite people to mark them as safe (and the way he would casually use Britta as a head rest when they sat next to each other on the couch or when they had been sitting at the Study Room table for too long somehow made it worse instead of better). 

Britta spent more and more time at the bar, which meant more and more time drunk or high or whatever. But, hey, at least she was getting paid, and anything was better than the couch in apartment 303. 

Sometimes, though, there wasn’t anywhere else to go, so Britta would lay on her couch-bed with her eyes closed, willing the yawning emptiness to stay balled up in the spot it had claimed just behind her ribcage and not suck her internal organs into a black hole from whence they would never return. Some days, it felt like her heart was teetering right along the edge of the gravity well and one wrong breath would tip it into oblivion. 

It was on one of those days that a pair of hands attached to cardigan covered arms carefully deposited a bowl of buttered noodles (chopsticks poking out at a jaunty angle) onto the center of her chest. She looked up to find Abed perched on the back of the couch hunched over his own bowl of noodles, sock clad feet tucked under her pillow. He was studying her with an intensity that filled her with such a strong impulse to hide she nearly jerked sideways spilling noodles everywhere, but the warmth was comforting and seemed to hold her in place like an anchor. 

“You’re broken, Britta. What do I do to fix you?” Abed spoke in the same slightly monotonous voice he always used, tone only just barely shifting to indicate a question, but his eyes were surprisingly kind and warm now that he was looking at instead of through her. 

Britta sighed. Abed had been ignoring her for days and that was not what she expected him to say, not that Abed ever did what she expected. “You can’t just fix people, Abed.”

Abed cocked his head to the side. When he spoke again, his voice was slightly nasal--the way it sometimes was when he was being really emphatic (or at least that was how Britta supposed he was being). “If you don’t try. You’re programmed badly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work.” 

"I'm not a robot, Abed," Britta responded shortly, thinking back to the fear she had felt when the Study Group had gathered to try to talk Abed through his stop-animated psychotic episode, and the pain and rejection she had felt when he had booted her out of Planet Abed (the first time, she thinks, that he had shown a preference for Annie over herself).

Abed gave her a look, like she was the one with a problem. He was right though--she was the one worried about the nothingness slowly hollowing out her insides while Abed was the one caring for her. Abed cared for people in small ways that passed largely unnoticed all the time (a warm drink, a person to talk to at the precise moment such a thing was needed the most, the right movie quote to make a situation suddenly start making sense); she had to start giving him more credit. "It's a metaphor."

“It’s not like we can look at my code or circuit boards or whatever and see what’s broken. I don’t know what’s wrong.” Britta tried to keep her voice level and not let her frustration show. It probably didn’t matter as long as she managed not to start yelling or get really sharp. Abed was never very good at picking up vocal cues (how he was generally able to figure out when Jeff was being sarcastic was one of life’s great mysteries) and was carefully studying her face, so she gave him a small smile, which he returned with a solemn nod. 

They sat in silence, Abed studying her in a way that was uncomfortably reminiscent of the only time she had been in the Dreamatorium and Abed had said terrible, carefully calculated to hurt, things. She trusted him to try to help, so she didn’t say anything, but she couldn’t lay there and let Abed stare at her while she was thinking about that. She sat up and began trying to eat her buttered noodles, carefully twisting the noodles around her chopsticks. Trust Abed to be fixated on something so difficult to eat. 

By the time Abed decided to speak, Britta was well and truly frustrated (at least it distracted her from the emptiness); she had spilled some of the strange butter sauce on her lap and had finally given up on twisting the noodles into a manageable sized bundle and stuck a bunch of them in her mouth, despite the dangly bits, so she had strange butter sauce all over her chin. 

“We forget Troy is important to you. I think it hurt you when he left more than you ever said.” 

Britta turned around so she could see Abed, since her sitting up had placed him behind her. He was looking at his hands knotted together in his lap. With her mouth still full of noodles, the only thing she could do was make a small noise of disagreement. He looked up, not quite meeting her eyes. The look on his face scared her; it wasn’t something she could put words to, maybe there weren’t words for it and it was a uniquely Abed look for a half-a-step-out-of-reality feeling that the rest of them couldn’t understand. 

“He was important to you. You were important to him too.” Abed spoke with a grave certainty that Britta couldn’t find words in the face of even though she had managed to swallow her noodles. She shook her head, not even precisely sure what she was disagreeing with (probably, maybe, almost definitely the last part). 

“Troy said so. He wouldn’t lie to me. Troy was always our best defense against getting dark. Especially for you, maybe even more than for me."

After what she had seen in the basement--the way it was so easy for him to make the insanity in his own head real for everyone else--Britta felt differently about the multiple time lines, like maybe just because Abed believed it, they could really just become evil versions of themselves. Maybe they all should be more scared of Abed, but he was the Study Group’s innocent. It didn’t seem right. And even if it was going to stay in his head, Abed could be using the conceit to work out something else; she didn’t want to dismiss it like she once would have.

“He was the one you depended on to tell you that you’re not the worst, or that you are but it doesn’t mean you’re without value and we still want to be your friend. You never found anything to fill that gap and now you are suffering for it. You can’t replace Troy but other people can help.”

“Abed, sometimes you’re really smart.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think I could have done what you did. Let go if I could have made Troy stay. And you could have; he said.” What Britta meant was, ‘Abed, you’re a good friend,’ but it seemed too easy of a thing to say for it to mean what it was supposed to.

Abed shook his head. “You would have,” he said softly, and Britta was almost sure he had understood.

Abed pulled out his laptop and sat down on the couch properly, clearly finished with the conversation. That was good; Britta felt drained. She looked over at his laptop screen. Abed was fiddling with an edit of footage from the infamous party, cuts that lingering on the edges of crowds, people talking with no hope of being heard, the moments where the actors had broken character and looked well and truly exhausted. Abed noticed she was watching and let the video play through. It made her feel eerie and strange--empty in the same way she had been feeling way too often recently--but for the first time in a while, she thought she might actually be ok because other people felt like this too. There couldn’t be anything too wrong with her.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a drabble about Britta's emotional state after Lawnmower Repair and Post-Natal Care, but (obviously) it got away from me. I guess I've had a lot of this in the back of my head since Geothermal Escapism. 
> 
> Constructive Criticism (and really any other type of comment) is always welcome.


End file.
